Incentive programs are typically offered by sponsoring organizations to promote the sales of their products or services, or to improve another measure of performance of participating employees and independent contractors of the sponsor. Incentive programs are also known as “promotions.” Participants in incentive programs may be a natural person, an animal, or an organization. Participants can receive credits that are accumulated and exchanged for services, such as travel, merchandise, or numismatic funds. Gaining and maintaining the motivation to achieve the rewards can be difficult for the participant. However, it has become well-known and publicized by personal-improvement experts such as Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins, by various twelve-step behavior modification programs such as the program sponsored by Alcoholic Anonymous Association, and through over five-hundred studies of the effects of goal-setting on work tasks, such as “Motivation Through Conscious Goal Setting, Applied and Preventive Psychology,” Locke, E. A., 1996, “Self-Regulation Through Goal Setting,” Academic Press, Latham, G. P. & Locke, E. A., 1991, “Further Evidence on the Relationship Between Goal Setting and Expectancy Theories, Organizing Behavior and Human Decision Process,” Klein, H. J., 1991, “A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance, Prentice Hall,” Locke, E. & Latham, G., 1990, “A Test of the Mediating Role of Goals in the Incentive-Performance Relationship, Journal of Applied Psychology,” Wright, P. M., 1989 and “The Influence of Monetary Incentives on Goal Choice, Goal Commitment and Task Performance, Organizational Behavior and Human Processes,” Reidel, J. A., Nebeker, D. M. & Cooper, B. L., 1988.
A participant who has self-selected a goal is more likely to gain and maintain the necessary motivation to achieve that goal than a participant who has no goal, or a goal that is not self-selected. Perhaps the most common use of goal-setting in business is in the establishment of quotas, incentive plans and bonus qualifiers. In general, such goals are established unilaterally by management, and because the process is top-down, with little or no opportunity for negotiation, the goals are sometimes rejected or ignored, and thus have little or no impact on performance.
Recording self-selected performance goals and recording the actual performance, and then comparing the actual performance to the goals and issuing rewards when goals are met, requires extensive resources. In particular, for organizations that wish to compensate numerous employees, vendors and independent contractors for their performance related to the organization, the resources needed for this highly specialized function are particularly expensive to acquire and reliably maintain. Furthermore, it has been observed that a participant's motivation will diminish over time when the same goals are repeatedly presented to the participant.
There is a need, therefore, for a computerized incentive system that overcomes all the above-described disadvantages. More specifically, there is a need for a computerized incentive system that records self-selected goals and performance of participants, compares the performance to the goals, assigns rewards to the participants pursuant to the comparison and heuristically adjusts the rewards threshold based on the prior history of achievement and performance of the participant.